The House on Sunset Lake

by Tasmina Perry

  Her shoes crunched on the gravel drive as she got out of the car. She wiped her damp palms on her skirt and walked up the limestone steps to the enormous front door. The housekeeper told her that Connor was in the library, and then silently disappeared.

  Jennifer moved through the house, treading carefully so that her shoes didn’t make a sound on the floor. The library was in a far wing. Like Casa D’Or, the Gilberts’ grand home was built on the banks of a river, and as she pushed open the door, she could see a glimmer of water in the distance. No lights were on, and the room had a cold and gloomy pall. She could just make out Connor sitting in a wing-backed chair that looked out over the grounds.

  Words deserted her. She was glad when he spoke first.

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got the balls to come here,’ he said, throwing the magazine he was reading down on the desk.

  ‘You’re right. And I’m surprised you even want to see me.’

  ‘I don’t,’ he said simply, getting to his feet. The expression on his face made her feel very cheap. ‘Was it good then? As good as you imagined?’

  ‘Connor, please . . .’

  ‘Do you expect me not to be angry? My girlfriend leaves her own twenty-first, the party at which we were supposed to be celebrating our engagement, and disappears into the night with the rock star,’ he said, his words full of sarcasm and scorn.

  ‘He’s my friend. I left the party just for a moment, just to say goodbye.’

  ‘And then you fucked him,’ he said, his lip curling into a sneer.

  She wasn’t going to deny what had happened; she was sick of lying.

  ‘I didn’t mean it to happen like that . . .’

  ‘How thoughtful of you. It’s lucky for you your mother did such a good job covering for you, otherwise the whole party would have seen you for the slut that you are.’

  ‘Is that what you think of me?’ she said, her whole body trembling.

  ‘You know, the reason I am so . . . set back by this,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘is because I do still love you. Stupid, isn’t it? Despite how you’ve treated me, your family and I still love you, except you don’t respect me, not one little bit.’

  ‘I do respect you, Connor. I just . . . I just developed feelings for someone else.’

  She could hear him take a deep inhalation of breath. His eyes closed. He looked furious.

  ‘When is he going back to London?’

  ‘Soon,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Good,’ he said, opening his eyes and fixing them on Jennifer.

  ‘I’m going with him.’

  His eyes almost popped in surprise.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to apply to film school. In London. I want to be with him.’

  He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what she was saying.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I am prepared to forgive you, and you want to run off to London with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ he repeated, taking an aggressive step forward. ‘You bitch. You absolute fucking whore.’

  His hand was coiled in a fist. He raised it and she thought he was going to hit her, but after one terrifying moment he slammed it through the air in frustration.

  ‘Get out!’ he roared as she held her handbag in front of her like a shield. ‘Did you not hear me?’ He picked up his magazine and hurled it across the room. ‘I said get out.’

  Jennifer turned and fled. As she stepped out into the humid air, she was aware that her decision to set her life on a new course had been irrevocably made. All that remained now was to go back to Jim and tell him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  2015

  The room was only half dark; Jim’s minimalist blinds looked good and offered privacy from prying eyes, but against the glare of New York’s setting sun, they were close to useless. He carried a glass of water towards the bed, stepping over the screwed-up tissues scattered across the floor like little rosebuds.

  ‘Here you go, medicine for the patient,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the mattress. Sarah had obviously been going down with something when she had come round the night before, but it had quickly developed into a full-blown cold overnight; so much so that she’d had the day off work and had still been in bed when Jim had returned home from the office.

  Sarah groaned and turned over, shielding her eyes. Her cheeks were as red as her nose, and her hair was sticking out at all angles. She took the pill from Jim and dutifully swallowed.

  ‘Thanks, babe,’ she croaked. ‘Sorry to be such a pain.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, you can’t help getting sick, can you?’

  Sarah made a half-hearted effort to smile, then collapsed back on to the pillows. ‘But I’m sick in your flat. I’m cramping your style.’

  Jim smiled. ‘Well I was planning on throwing a party later, but Hugh Hefner and Tommy Lee have called in sick too.’

  ‘You should go out,’ she said, propping herself up with a pillow. ‘By the sounds of it, Jen needs cheering up.’

  Jim felt guilty for sharing Connor’s confidences. He hadn’t told Sarah everything, of course. Hadn’t told her most things, in fact: Jennifer’s pregnancies, the drinking. But he had wanted to see his old friend socially and felt awkward meeting her alone after everything Connor had said. He’d suggested the four of them go out for dinner, but when Sarah had dragged her heels, blaming her workload and the addition of the Hamptons summer social circuit to her reporting brief, he’d pushed the issue, saying that Jennifer needed ‘a fun night out’.

  ‘We can reschedule,’ he said, handing her another tissue.

  ‘Connor’s booked Domina,’ she said, shaking her head and blowing her nose noisily. ‘It’s properly difficult to get a table there. Go on, go. Tell them that funny story about Celine Wood giving you drugs. Besides, you’ve got Tivo in the bedroom and I want to catch up with Dancing with the Stars.’

  Jim hadn’t seen Connor since Baruda, three weeks earlier, although they had spoken on the phone. The sale of RedReef was now going through and everything was in the hands of the lawyers. Simon had taken Jim out for dinner to congratulate him on the idea of an Omari diffusion brand, and when he confided that the wheels were in motion to make Jim CEO of the entire hotel group when Casa D’Or was finished, Jim believed that there had been some karma in trying to help Connor, or more specifically Jennifer, out.

  Domina had apparently only been open a week. As Jim arrived, several couples who had made the social faux pas of just turning up on the night to ask for a table were being told by a frosty-looking platinum blonde that they were now taking bookings for six months’ time. Their own table was, meanwhile, not quite ready. He went to the bar and saw Jennifer sitting there alone, one black-trousered leg elegantly crossed over the other, a bronze pump dangling from her tanned foot. It looked so casual: the outfit, her dark hair pinned up, a flash of gold at wrist and neck, like she had just thrown it all on in a rush.

  ‘Hey,’ he smiled, giving her an awkward peck on the cheek. ‘Where’s Connor?’

  ‘Not coming.’ She held her phone up and looked piqued. ‘He’s just called. He’s out with investors and the meeting has finished but now they want to go on somewhere.’

  She said it as though she didn’t believe it, but Jim knew the form of these things. Appointments turned to dinner and drinks, then private clubs, even strip joints – macho pleasures in the name of business – and you were generally beholden to the person holding the purse strings. By that logic he wondered if Connor’s priority shouldn’t be seeing him this evening, but being here alone with Jennifer looking like a goddess, he couldn’t help giving a silent prayer of thanks to the bankers who had taken Connor for a night on the tiles.

  ‘Where’s Sarah?’ asked Jennifer, putting her phone in her bag and looking around.

  ‘Ill. Bad cold,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I didn’t cancel earlier because we thought she was going to be all right, but when I left, she was doing a
fairly accurate impression of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’

  ‘I hope she’s OK,’ said Jennifer with concern. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Actually, she seemed pretty determined to have a night in watching the telly alone.’

  ‘Such are your charms,’ she quipped.

  ‘So it’s just us.’

  ‘Me, you, the uptight staff.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ he said, as the bartender gazed determinedly through him.

  ‘Do you want to stay here?’ she whispered.

  ‘There’s about a dozen people who give a shit about places like this clamouring to get in at the door.’

  ‘Then we should do our bit for the community and give them our table,’ she smiled, finishing her drink and picking up her clutch bag.

  As they left, Jim approached an anxious-looking man in the atrium.

  ‘Give the name Connor Gilbert at reception and have a nice night with your girl,’ he said.

  When he got out on to the street, Jennifer was waiting for him. He wondered if they had been too rash in leaving. Maybe she just wanted to go home.

  ‘Fancy grabbing some pizza?’ Not his best line.

  ‘Pizza?’

  ‘You know, big, round, tomatoes and cheese on the top. Tend to be the size of dinner plates in London, coffee tables in New York.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  ‘How about here?’ he said pointing at a typical by-the-slice pizza parlour.

  People were staring as they waited by the counter. If Jennifer noticed, she pretended not to. Jim ordered a full-size cheese pie and handed over twenty dollars. On the street, he opened the box and handed her a slice, gooey strings of hot mozzarella stretching out as he pulled it from the round.

  ‘You look like Holly Golightly,’ he grinned, thinking of the famous scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  ‘She was eating a doughnut,’ Jennifer quipped back.

  ‘To the sound of “Moon River”,’ said Jim quietly, without even thinking.

  ‘Is that our soundtrack?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he replied as a string of cheese burned the back of his hand. ‘Shit,’ he said, shaking it.

  ‘Are you OK?’ She pulled a tissue out of her bag and handed it to him. ‘Pizza pies. Not the easiest thing to eat in the street. We should have stuck to Krispy Kremes.’

  ‘What am I going to do with this?’ he laughed, balancing the brown box on his free hand.

  ‘Why don’t we finish it at mine? We’re just round the corner. You haven’t seen our house yet.’

  * * *

  The Wyatt-Gilbert residence was a town house on 61st Street. It had a shiny black door, a run of arched windows and a plastic surgeon next door, or so said the discreet gold sign on the brickwork. The whole street reeked of money, as did the fragrant smell of expensive candles when Jennifer let him into the hall.

  A shaggy copper-coloured dog ran up to them. Jim wasn’t much of a pet person, but this one was cute. It jumped up at him, excited by the smell of the pizza.

  ‘Mars Bar, get down.’

  ‘Your dog is called Mars Bar?’ He laughed.

  ‘I’ll get some plates,’ she said, already in the kitchen.

  Jim peered down the long corridor, mentally comparing it to his own one-bedroom walk-up in the Village. In his line of vision he could see a Picasso and an elevator door, as if to emphasise how far apart their lives had become; or perhaps it was that they had maintained the status quo from when they had first met.

  He turned left, to the room nearest him, and went in. A living room, the sort of space realtors called ‘the snug’. More expensive art and, on a sideboard, a row of photographs of the happy couple. A tasteful black-and-white of their wedding day that was so hard to look at he had to move away.

  He sat down and balanced the pizza box on his lap, nervous of getting tomato sauce on the pale green sofa. Jennifer came through with two plates, then went to the drinks cabinet and took out a pair of glasses.

  ‘Red or white?’ she asked.

  ‘Neither,’ he said carefully. ‘Don’t bother opening a bottle just for me.’

  ‘I’m having a drink,’ she said.

  ‘Coffee,’ he said as light-heartedly as he could. ‘I’ll go and brew up if you like.’

  She put the glasses back down on the cabinet and Jim felt a note of relief, as if a moment of danger had passed.

  She went to make coffee. When she came back, she sat in the chair opposite him and curled her fingers around her cup.

  ‘How long have you lived here?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten years.’

  ‘It’s a real grown-up house,’ he smiled, thinking of himself at thirty, the proud new owner of a maisonette in Kentish Town, his first step on the housing ladder. The scales had since fallen from his eyes about the London housing market. He was older, wiser. He had made sacrifices in his professional life, chasing money and position rather than the creative fulfilment he knew he would have got as a musician. And yet he guessed that short of winning the lottery, that maisonette would be as high as he ever got on the property ladder.

  ‘And here we are, all grown up,’ she said, stroking Mars Bar, who had come and plonked himself down between them.

  ‘You make it sound as if we’ve changed.’

  ‘Haven’t we?’ she smiled, looking up.

  ‘I still feel the same as I did when I was twenty. Although I’ll see a really bad photo of myself in a trade magazine and think, who the hell is that? Sarah told me the other day that it was time to retire my Converse All Stars. I thought she meant because they were knackered. On reflection, she probably thinks they make me look a bit sad.’

  ‘You’ll still be cool at sixty, Jim Johnson. I can see it now. Sharp suits, a beautiful woman on your arm, and a cigarette dangling out of your mouth.’

  ‘You make me sound like an ageing gigolo. That wasn’t what I had in mind when you interviewed me at twenty.’

  ‘Interview?’

  ‘The documentary. Or have you forgotten?’

  ‘The documentary.’ She cringed, throwing her hands behind her head. ‘Did I really think I was going to be the new Martin Scorsese?’

  ‘Now that would have been impressive. A Savannah gangster movie. What happened to it?’ he said more seriously.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said honestly. She puffed out her cheeks and looked at him. ‘I was living in New York by the Christmas. It’s hard to make a documentary about your home-town friends when you’re hundreds of miles away from them.’

  ‘You never applied to film school?’

  She gave him a sad smile. ‘I thought about it. But I’d missed the next year’s intake, and by the following year I was married. A housewife at twenty-three. I didn’t imagine that when I filmed myself for the documentary either.’ Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘It’s very fashionable being a domestic goddess,’ he said, trying to make her feel better. ‘I know loads of women with high-powered jobs in London. Get them drunk and they’ll tell you that all they want to do is give up work and spend the day in the gym and on the school run.’

  ‘Is that how far feminism has really come?’

  ‘What I’m saying is that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay at home.’

  ‘Well, I always seem to be busy. Decorating the loft, selling the loft, buying this place. When I look back and wonder where the time went, I guess I’ve probably spent most of it in ABC Carpet and Home. And the charities. They keep me very busy. In fact there was something I meant to ask you. I’m doing an event for a Brooklyn animal shelter at Christmas. We need prizes for an auction. Any chance of a two-night stay in an Omari hotel?’

  ‘You can have a week in any of our resorts in the world, food and drink included,’ he said, happy to help.

  ‘Have you still got it?’ he asked after another moment.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The documentary.’

  ‘Somewhere,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘
Go and have a look,’ he encouraged her.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I want to see this cool guy you remember.’

  She hesitated for a moment, then gave him that big warm smile and disappeared upstairs.

  He looked around, taking in the details of the house. He had always believed that there was nothing more revealing than being in someone’s personal space. So often it was a perfect reflection of themselves. He thought about the homes of his friends back in London; his football pals with their small children and their terraced houses, toys everywhere, vaguely managed chaos and an air of comfortable neglect. Or his own flat, with its Swedish furniture; wilfully independent, a design-conscious space for one.

  He grabbed a coffee table book – something about Parisian interiors – and started to flick through it as he waited for Jennifer to return, but she didn’t come back.

  ‘Where is she?’ he whispered to Mars Bar, who got up, tail wagging, and disappeared out of the room.

  Jim smiled to himself and got up.

  ‘Jen,’ he shouted.

  He could see Mars Bars’ tail disappearing up the stairs and followed him.

  ‘Jen?’

  ‘In here,’ came a muffled reply.

  He passed the master bedroom: huge bed, plump pillows. Thankfully she wasn’t in there.

  ‘Top floor,’ she shouted.